Electronic design automation (EDA) is a general term used to describe computer-based design tools that assist an engineer or designer in their design tasks. EDA tools are especially useful in the integrated circuit (IC) design field. The improvement of EDA tools for IC design work has enabled a corresponding increase in speed to market for electronic products and facilitated a greater level of sophisticated interoperability between systems used by disparate designers and manufacturers.
EDA tools often involve circuit schematic capture, design verification and circuit layout for IC circuit design in the analog, digital, mixed signal, and custom circuit devices fields. With the layout aspect of EDA work, IC designers continue to strive towards more efficient use of a device's physical space. Manual and automated layout tools within conventional EDA tools commonly assist IC designers in this manner. When attempting to maximize circuit density within design rule constraints, IC designers often need to manipulate the layout of a device design, which can be onerous and introduce errors leading to performance issues or other design rule violations. Thus, particular attention is paid to layout within EDA tools.
Parameterized cells (PCells) provide an advanced level of EDA to help better address layout tasks faced by an IC designer. PCells are commonly known within the EDA and IC design fields to allow for changing the size, shape or contents of each cell instance, without changing the original cell. As such, similar to concepts of object-oriented programming, PCells introduce an improved level of abstraction to the component levels of IC design. This helps accelerate the layout task facing an IC designer and helps avoid or reduce design rule verification errors by simplifying complex shapes and devices that may be generated and edited within an EDA tool. However, there remains a need for an improved way to use and manipulate PCells within an EDA tool that results in an efficient and custom device layout design.